MIT professor Regina Barzilay won the $1m Squirrel AI Award for her work on machine learning models to develops drugs and diagnose breast cancer. Barzilay, a breast cancer survivor, is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

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• The award, given by the nonprofit Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, recognizes achievements in AI that benefit humanity. Online education company Squirrel AI provides the $1m prize.
• Barzilay was chosen for her research developing deep ML models for molecule candidates and drug discovery, including anew antibiotic called Halicin, which can kill various species of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
• She has also developed algorithms for early diagnosis and risk assessment of breast cancer and is working to roll out these diagnostic tools to underprivileged populations. Unlike similar tools, Barzilay’s model has been shown to be equally accurate for white and black women.
• In addition to being a professor, Barzilay co-leads MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health, which is working on AI Cures for COVID-19 antivirals, and is a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.
• The Association of Computing Machinery’s A.M. Turing Award and the Nobel Prize also give out monetary awards at the million-dollar level.

Facebook has taken down 155 China-based fake accounts that used AI-generated faces. The networks of fake accounts apparently used Generative Adversarial Networks to create the faces of non-real humans, similar to the website www.thispersondoesnotexist.com.

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• Facebook commissioned social analytics company Graphika to study the accounts and analyze the techniques behind them.
• The accounts reportedly posted content in support of and opposing presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as well as former candidate Pete Buttigieg, among other content. The scale of the operation, run from China's Fujian province, was small, Facebook noted.
• In a related report, Graphika noted that GAN-imagined AI is now "readily available online" and can be used and abused by covert operations. This type of AI "has exploded in the last year," it said.
• Ben Nimmo, Graphika's head of investigations, had this to say about the AI-generated faces:

Spotlight on ML startup WhyLabs

Inside AI takes a closer look at this Seattle startup, which just came out of stealth mode after announcing its investment-heavy AI data monitoring platform. It's the latest startup to spin out of Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2).

Background: Who's Who

• The startup was founded in December 2019 by former Amazon machine learning engineers, Alessya Visnjic, Sam Gracie, and Andy Dang along with Madrona Venture Group principal Maria Karaivanova, a former Cloudflare executive.
• CEO Visnjic is a University of Washington grad who worked on Amazon's machine learning infrastructure, including its demand forecasting model, for eight years. During that time, she met employees Dang, a former Amazon ML engineer, and Gracie, a principal UX designer with the machine learning group...

Beyond Limits, a developer of industrial and enterprise-grade AI tech, has raised $133m to expand in the U.S. and internationally. The round — led by AI cloud company Group 42 and BP Ventures, the energy firm's investing arm — brings the Glendale, California-based firm's fundraising to nearly $160m.

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• The company sells Cognitive AI software that solves real-world problems in sectors like utilities, energy, and health care as it learns over time.
• So far, it's helped to develop a COVID-19 forecasting model and predict maintenance at power plants to reduce carbon impacts, among other solutions.
• Its tech relies on several dozen technologies developed at Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
• Beyond Limits said it will use the capital to expand in the U.S. and elsewhere. It's planning a regional headquarters in Singapore and further operations in Hong Kong, Taipei, and Tokyo. It will also further fund its R&D program and develop its Cognitive AI app and SaaS products.

Volkswagen's truck unit and autonomous driving firm TuSimple will develop self-driving trucks. Under a deal announced this week, TuSimple and Volkswagen’s Traton division will jointly develop the autonomous vehicles based on TuSimple's self-driving technology, which it's been testing on public roads since 2015.

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• TuSimple currently operates a fleet of 40 self-driving trucks with backup safety drivers that transfer freight between Texas and Arizona.
• The entities want to build “Level 4” trucks, which would be fully driverless operations on predetermined routes and defined driving conditions. They would be trucks under the Traton brands.
• Traton will also take a minority stake in San Diego-based TuSimple, which also counts Nvidia, Sina, and Composite Capital as among its investors. The size of the stake remains undisclosed.
• Earlier this year, TuSimple announced plans to create automated trucks with Navistar and build a maps network that would expand its autonomous vehicles operations across the U.S. by 2024. TuSimple is also seeking to raise $250 million in a Series E round, which Traton could participate in.

Amazon plans to open its latest robotics-based warehouse in Nampa, Idaho, soon. The $130 million fulfillment center is one of Amazon's 50 fulfillment centers, out of 150 in the U.S., to use robotics to move products and fulfill deliveries.

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• The facility's roughly 2,00 workers will work with robots to sort, pack, and ship products. The warehouse actually has more workers than average because its robotics systems can move items more quickly.
• Robots shaped like Roomba vacuums will move bins of products weighing thousands of pounds. They work without human intervention unless they need to be disabled for maintenance.
• The warehouse is set to open before the holiday season.

• The U.S. National Security Commission on AI is seeking comments from small and medium-sized AI firms about how the government could work alongside industry to boost commercial innovation.
• Adobe unveiled a new AI-based Liquid Mode in Acrobat Reader to make PDFs easier to read on mobile devices.
• YouTube says it will begin using machine learning to automatically add age restrictions to inappropriate videos.
• Kroger plans to deploy Everseen’s Visual AI and ML platform to another 2,500 stores in an effort to lower customer errors at self-checkouts.
• Microsoft revealed updates to its Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Machine Learning.
• Brands see 18.5% of e-commerce revenue from SMS marketing. See 6 top SMS campaigns here.* 

*This is a sponsored link.

Tweet of the Day: Oceanographer Derya Akkaynak and engineer Tali Treibitz created a computer vision algorithm that shows what underwater scenes would look like without water.